Blog

With a focus on housing and public space, the first of three sessions co-organised by the ICA, the Architecture Space and Society Centre at Birkbeck (ASSC), and CHASE brought together practitioners, theorists, activists and students to try and answer what might at first seem like a trick question. ‘Where is the social in Architecture?’ Surely the answer is ‘everywhere’? After all, is there any aspect of architectural space and architectural practice which is not thoroughly social?

Saturday 2nd December saw over 200 CHASE DTP Scholars gather at my home institution – the University of Essex, near Colchester, for the twice-yearly Encounters conference.The Encounters experience began in earnest on Friday evening, in Colchester Castle, with a drinks reception.

My CHASE placement occurred over a six-month period in the London headquarters of Unruly Media, a global video ad tech firm. Unruly are an industry leader in the distribution of online video advertising—for instance, those ads and trailers that pop up when you are reading an article online, or that you might opt-in to play on your favourite website.

During my placement I worked with INFORM (The Information Network on Religious Movements, based at the London School of Economics. Founded in 1988 by renowned sociologist Professor Eileen Barker, INFORM is a charity that specialises in providing the public with balanced and detailed information on new religions and minority movements.

Delegates from all disciplines, departments and CHASE institutions were offered exclusive access to the hallowed shelves of Norwich Cathedral’s library for one afternoon only. Tucked inside the cloister is a collection of liturgical and secular works which have been donated and accumulated over the years by the diocese, with the earliest printed text in this collection dating to 1474.

My CHASE-funded placement at the archive of the Cinémathèque française, where I spent three months taking stock of films pertaining to their sub-Saharan African collections, has informed and transformed my ongoing PhD research in profound ways.

My research at Goldsmiths is investigating the implications of the internet for contemporary poetry and poetics: as a primarily text-based medium radically shifting the coordinates of communication; as a catalyst for contemporary textual saturation; and, of course, as a digital space where poetry is read, published and disseminated.

I’m delighted to say that Dr Denise DeCaires-Narain will be taking on the role of CHASE Director from the beginning of August. Denise is a colleague in the School of English at Sussex, with research interests that will be close to many of you (you can read more about her here: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/682). I’m sure you will join me in welcoming her to CHASE and I hope she has as stimulating a time as I have in taking CHASE forward over the next few years.

The Institute for World Literature (IWL) is a month long program of seminars, lectures, colloquiua and panel sessions convened by David Damrosch of Harvard University. It offers a dynamic space for more than a hundred scholars from across the globe to study questions and debates around world and comparative literary disciplines.

Between January and March 2016, I undertook an 8-week placement in the Coins and Medals Department at the British Museum as part of my CHASE-funded PhD. In order to maximise my employability, I was advised that obtaining work experience at the British Museum would be beneficial.

On 12th and 13th February 2016 The Courtauld Institute of Art hosted a Joint Annual Renaissance Early Modern Postgraduate Symposium, entitled “Placing Prints: New Developments in the Study of Print, 1400-1800”. The two-day conference stemmed from shared research interests of four PhD Candidates at The Courtauld, working both in the Renaissance and Early Modern sections.

by Tatiana Bissolati, Chloe Gilling (The Courtauld Instituties of Art, CHASE-funded students) and Naomi Lebens and Bryony Bartlett-Rawlings (The Courtauld Institute of Art).

I am currently one month into a 4 months part time placement at BUFVC in London. I am working on a research project to do with newsreel cameramen who worked during the war and digitising tapes from a documentary about newsreel cameramen shot in 1981 called 'They Made News'.

I am researching patrons of art in the Umbrian towns of central Italy, in the years 1480 to 1510, and in particular I am interested in tracing networks of patrons in this area at a time that a flowering of patronage of artists. Having spent time of researching existing scholarship, last year I came to a point no doubt familiar to many scholars, when I had questions that were not going to be answered without going to the primary source. It was time to start my archive research.

My CHASE placement entailed working for two months as a Project Coordinator for the Institute of Contemporary Arts’ Luis Buñuel retrospective. This terrific opportunity to be behind the scenes of an institution that promotes an understanding of radical art and culture brought me into close contact with a broad spectrum of activities.

Challenging Gender, Embracing Intersectionality? was a fantastic CHASE symposium right at the end of November at the Open University in Camden. Student led, it was a great event to be part of as a CHASE student, giving me the opportunity to meet up with some other students that I’d met at different CHASE events last year. The timing was great, coming right after the Encounters conference, and it felt like a natural continuation of discussions from some of the groups we were in.

Autonomy of Self was my first curated group exhibition, bringing together moving image and photography from across the former Ottoman territories to explore how individuals are using the human image to refuse violence and conflict. Consequences of the Empire’s collapse in 1922, and the impact of subsequent interventions from “Western” states still resonate in the identity and actions of countries in this territory today.

The Royal Holloway Picture Gallery is a hidden treasure-trove of Victoriana. A vast oblong room with an ornate bas-relief ceiling and walls crowded with epic paintings in gilt frames, it conveys an almost obscene sense of ostentatiousness appropriate to the period. As a small group, we were almost swallowed up by the space and were privileged to be granted exclusive use of it for the day. Dwarfed by the epic grandeur, you would be forgiven for assuming that the picture gallery belonged to a palace. Indeed, the Royal Holloway campus is modelled on the Chateau de Chambord.

Once a narrow territory, now, the scholarly field of sound is extending beyond its disciplinary boundaries; its traces can be increasingly found within the academic fields of media archeology, politics, aesthetics, science, and others. Aurality, as a connecting inter-disciplinary agent, brings voices, bodies, notions of power and resistance, questions of art and forms of reception, into a lively debate – one that not only offers alternative methods and conceptualization approaches, but also introduces new forms of knowledge.

To the British Museum Ethnographic Store (on a somewhat shabby street in Haggerston, east London) for a day thinking about the histories of First-Nation American artefacts and the social relations involved in their collection. We arrived to find a smorgasbord of objects spread out on the tables, from Inuit model snowshoes to Mayan pottery and Iroquoian wampum garters and belts.

Following on from the success of last year's inaugural event, I am very pleased to be a co-convener of the 2nd Royal Musical Association's Music and Philosophy Study Group's second workshop on the Philosophy of Human+Computer Music, which will be held in the University of Sheffield on 27th May 2015.

‘From Above and Below’ was an event I recently curated at the Mosaic Rooms in London, which brought together a series of investigations into the shifting parameters of contemporary warfare. The intention of the event was not only to convey the position or physical viewpoint - from above - which the state apparatus utilises as part of modern day conflict, exemplified by the use of armed drones and aerial bombing.

The workshop as a whole was genuinely practice-led. The way that conversations developed from this and ideas were investigated through actual activity provided a palpable example of how conventional research can be informed by less traditional academic approaches and also group work.

The overlap between textual and material cultures is hardly a new concept. From ages past, when the majority of the population was illiterate, objects have been understood to possess a powerful legibility of their own. And with the simultaneous increase in consumer culture and print dissemination, the written word was often accompanied with a price tag. Words are goods, regardless of their quality. This is pertinently true of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century periodicals, and was at the forefront of this workshop’s material and digital witness.

I have been studying at Kent now for almost five years and have been to Canterbury Cathedral countless times for research, workshops, seminars, carol concerts, and two graduations; I even see it every morning when I eat my breakfast, but I try not to take this familiarity for granted. Approaching the library and archives via Christchurch Gate is always exciting and as I made my way around the cloisters to the Dean’s steps I thought how fitting it was to be examining the material aspects of the written word within a stone’s throw of the site of the cathedral’s medieval scriptorium.

The Consortium for the Arts and Humanities for South East England (CHASE) welcomed Matthew Taylor as a keynote speaker at the inaugural Encounters conference that marked the first cohort of Arts and Humanities Research Council Funded doctoral students, and their supervisors, from the seven universities of CHASE.

Matthew Taylor is chief executive of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. Taylor has a sustained interest in social change.